Saturday, February 14, 2009

Valentine Nice

So here I am sitting in a flat overlooking the Baie des Anges. It's Nice, with Niçois sunshine, blue sky and not a cloud. I have yet to poke my nose outside to test the temperature, but it augurs well.

Yesterday I actually took my car and drove here. This is something I would never have done up until January mainly because I wasn't sure whether courroie de distribution (?) had been changed when I bought it. It's the one which, if it goes, costs you a good 2000€ to have it repaired because it jams up all the soupapes.

When I bought the car I asked if it had been done, and the owners said they had no invoices but the previous owner had sworn black and blue that it had. Hmmm, a not overly-reliable response there, so I tended to avoid taking it on long journeys.

Eventually though, it got to the point where it made me anxious about any trip outside Montpellier, and as the Peugeot garage was doing a regular maintence on it in January, I asked them to change the offending piece.

So now I'm happily confident that that bit won't break down I am able to drive to Nice. Freedom!

Thus I could be with my TWDB for Valentine's day. Not that I'm a great follower of it. I object to the overt attempt at commercial manipulation. Once a year at Christmas is quite enough, ta! Anyway, I sent a Valentine's message by email including a photo manipulated by obamicon.me. It's the site where you can turn any photo into an iconic poster like the one made for the Obama election in red, blue and cream with the word 'Hope' beneath.

Paste magazine have developed a smoochy version called 'luvicon.me' which uses grades of pink. Perfect for a Valentine's message without schmaltzy cheesey pap. Alternatively, you could try jimpix.co.uk for cool ecards - no pap, no cheese, no schmaltz - just good graphic design using Flash.

We're off to Antibes today where we'll have a nice little lunch somewhere by the sea and suss out the furniture he wants to buy for his flat.